Yes Means Yes, So What’s the Catch? A Reading List About Consent

These are interesting articles that I’d recommend reading. I especially agree with this point in the third article in the reading list:

“Administrators are, meanwhile, directly, materially tethered to the reputations of their institutions. No one who understands this should be surprised to learn that sexual assault adjudications are often delayed till the aggressor graduates or the victim drops out.

The cosplay that is campus criminal justice was simply never about valuing women’s lives in the first place. It’s always been about protecting institutions.”

Colleges and universities repeatedly fail to properly address sexual harassment and violence on their campuses. Although the general idea behind “yes means yes” makes sense to me, what doesn’t make sense is allowing these institutions to continue to adjudicate these crimes internally, conflating their students’ interests and their own.

I subscribe to writer Ann Friedman’s fabulous newsletter, where she recently shared a link to an article she wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine. Friedman visited the University of California at Santa Barbara and interviewed twenty-something students about their sexual habits and desires—specifically if they’d been affected by the “Yes Means Yes” law, SB 967, which demands enthusiastic consent from all parties throughout a sexual encounter.

I’d heard of SB 967, but I hadn’t done any real research about it. Unsurprisingly, I discovered a variety of reactions. Some feminists welcome the bill wholeheartedly, while others are trepidatious about its limitations and do not think it does enough to protect victims and their advocates.